


It Was Definitely Clint's Fault

by onward_came_the_meteors



Series: October 2020 Prompts [7]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Tower, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Literal Sleeping Together, One Shot, POV Third Person, Post-Avengers (2012), Sharing a Bed, Sleep Deprivation, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:08:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26876437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: A couple hours had passed when Bruce finally heard footsteps coming down the stairs and looked up to see Tony jumping the bottom step into the lab.Predictably, he made a beeline for Bruce. “There you are—I was starting to think everyone had packed up and deserted the place. What gives, green bean?”Bruce stifled a yawn behind his hand. “Didn’t JARVIS tell you?”
Relationships: Bruce Banner & Tony Stark
Series: October 2020 Prompts [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947679
Comments: 8
Kudos: 55





	It Was Definitely Clint's Fault

**Author's Note:**

> Day 7, for the prompt "carrying"

As often happened when the Avengers had a mission that required secrecy and stealth, Bruce got to stay behind in the lab.

He really couldn’t blame them; as himself, he wasn’t exactly cut out for the same skill sets that, say, Natasha was, and as the Other Guy… no, definitely not. He could leave these particular missions up to the rest of the team.

And as these particular missions became more and more frequent as the team tracked down any leads on the location of Loki’s scepter, Bruce found himself spending more and more time staying behind.

Tonight was no different; he hung in a corner and watched as Thor shrugged into his armor, Clint slung his quiver across his back, Natasha loaded her gun with fresh bullets, and Steve picked up his shield (Tony was on the other side of the world on a business trip with Pepper; he hadn’t answered any of their calls, which made Bruce strongly suspect he’d put JARVIS on mute. Not that Tony would have been able to reach them in time anyway). It was always funny to try and discern how his teammates felt about him staying behind—half of them seemed to feel bad for him, and the other half seemed to view it as lucky, like he was getting to stay home from school or something.

_ That would be one hell of a doctor’s note _ , Bruce thought, smiling a little as Clint’s voice reached his ears.

“Come  _ on _ ,” Clint was saying, wobbling a little on one foot as he yanked on his boot. “I wanna stay here too. You guys never even let me shower before one of these things.”

Natasha gave him a look. “Oh, shush. If there’s a building anywhere that no one’s currently falling off of, I don’t think Fury would be able to keep you away.” Clint laughed as she turned to Bruce. “Maybe you’ll be able to join us next time; who knows.”

Bruce gave a half shrug, because he really wasn’t sure how to say  _ thanks, but you know I don’t actually like the constant mortal peril and catastrophic destruction, right?  _

“Maybe,” he echoed. Steve glanced in his direction from where he was strapping his helmet on, because nothing said “stealth mission” like a giant letter “A” on the forehead.

“Hopefully, this will be the last time, and we’ll come back with that scepter.” He paused. “Nothing personal, Banner—we were pretty close to leaving Thor behind, too.”

Thor laughed and knocked into the shoulder of a barely-suppressing-his-grin Steve before his face fell again into seriousness. “I do hope we retrieve the scepter tonight, although I will miss fighting alongside all of you—and definitely with this one.” He nodded at Bruce.

Bruce held up his hand. “Wait. You mean fighting  _ next  _ to him, right? Not like fighting… with him with him?”

“Of course not! Of course not.” Thor’s blue eyes met Bruce’s, wide and innocent.

“Great.”

Once the rest of the team was all set to go—and they had done this whole routine so many times that it didn’t take too long at all—they stepped out onto the landing deck and boarded the quinjet. Bruce hovered at the door for a few more minutes, just long enough to see it become a black speck and disappear into the clouds, and then went back inside. 

The Tower was a lot quieter when it was just Bruce alone, but he supposed that made sense. The team wasn’t exactly a serene bunch. His footsteps echoed on the stairs down to the lab, which was darker and more silent than anything belonging to and designed by Tony Stark had a right to be.

As though on cue, JARVIS flicked on the lights and turned on the computer at Bruce’s desk. Bruce tilted his head up at the ceiling and said “thanks” under his breath before sitting down and opening the file for a new theory he’d been working on.

It went on like that for a few hours—although it seemed longer because of the silence, and Bruce was constantly interrupting himself to check the time and the news stations to make sure there weren’t any headlines like “ _ The Avengers Are All Dead”  _ because he was morbid like that—before JARVIS interrupted him halfway through an equation.

“Doctor Banner, I believe Agent Barton is attempting to get ahold of you.”

“Tell him I didn’t touch his leftovers, but he might want to ask Thor,” Bruce said without looking up from his screen.

“That is not his reason for calling. He sounds rather urgent.”

That got Bruce’s attention; he scooted back in his chair and glanced up at the ceiling. “Put him in.”

JARVIS didn’t need him to ask twice, and a second later Clint’s voice was crackling out of wherever the speakers were in this room.

“—swear to god if you don’t pick up, Banner— _ shit _ —oh, hey!” Clint’s tone was light and trying very hard to be casual, but Bruce could hear the muffled grunting and cursing in the background, as well as the explosions in the even further-back background. “So, uh… yeah, so you know how to defuse a bomb, right?”

Bruce stood up out of his chair, like he could somehow step into wherever Clint was. “Probably? I mean, I’d have to—wait— _ Clint? _ ”

“I think we’ve established that.”

“What are you doing with a bomb?” Bruce ran his hand through his hair, starting to pace around the lab. He felt a curious growl in the back of his brain and shoved it down. The team was miles away, and losing it here wouldn’t accomplish anything except destroying the lab and leaving Barton to deal with the bomb on his own. 

“You think I wanted this?” Clint made a frustrated sound, and there was a muffled  _ clang _ followed almost immediately by more swearing. “It’s some kind of enhanced chemical thing, I don’t know how it works—but it’s big.” Another unidentifiable sound, this one echoing like a gong, and Clint corrected himself. “Very big.”

Bruce nodded a couple times. “Okay. Where is it?”

The speakers staticked with Clint’s laugh before he apparently realized Bruce was being serious. “Oh. Well, uh, I’m kinda… sitting on it?”

“You’re  _ what? _ ”

“Hey, hey, please don’t freak out—you’re literally the only person I can call and I don’t think the Hulk is gonna be up for disarming this thing.” Clint’s voice was rushed, almost frantic, but strangely enough, that was what made Bruce focus.

He took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m calm. Just—any reason  _ why  _ you’re sitting on the bomb?”

“‘Cause I’m kinda stuck here? It’s pressure-sensitive according to the Hydra psycho who built it, and nobody else is here yet—they sent me in first for recon, but… I may have triggered the burglar alarm.”

Bruce was going to need some more deep breaths to get through this. “Of course I’ll help. How long before one of the others can get to you, do you think?”

“Hmm.” There was a rustling noise, and Clint must’ve taken his coms out of his ears, because suddenly Bruce could hear all the crashing and shooting and thundering (literally) with a much greater clarity before Clint shoved them back in. “They’ll get in here, all right, but something tells me Cap isn’t gonna be a huge help with this—his solution will be to sacrifice himself again, and three against eighty-seven are a lot worse odds than four against eighty-seven.”

“There’s eighty-seven Hydra in there with you?”

“Might be closer to eighty by now.” Clint paused and hastily added, “But that’s just another day at the office, y’know? I just meant that Rogers has no chill.”

“If you’re looking for chill, I think you called the wrong person,” Bruce said wryly, but he was already saving the files he’d been working on and pulling up several new screens.

“Listen, Banner, you’re one of two geniuses I have a phone number for and I don’t even know what country Stark’s in right now. You got this.” That point was somewhat diminished a half second later when there was another loud  _ crash  _ and Clint yelped “ _ fuck. _ ”

Bruce’s fingers flew over the keyboard. “Just give me a minute.”

* * *

Bruce Banner had dealt with normal bombs plenty of times. He had worked for the military’s science division, after all.

Unfortunately, now he worked with the Avengers, which meant he no longer  _ got  _ to work with normal bombs. Instead, he had to deal with insanely hypercomplicated magnetized antimatter-particle bombs built by Hydra from whatever scraps of tesseract technology they still had lying around.

It took hours for Bruce to figure out how to defuse the thing, a process made even longer by the fact that every piece of information had to be relayed back and forth between him and Clint, and the cacophony of battle in the background meant that it sometimes took two or three tries for them to hear each other. JARVIS helped as much as possible, but there was still only so much the AI could do. Sometime halfway through the ordeal, the rest of the team had managed to break into whatever part of the base Clint was in—leading to a lot of staticky yelling through the speakers as he tried to explain how hitting this with Mjolnir would be a  _ very bad idea, Thor. _

Once the wires were snapped, the bomb went dead (Bruce had made them wait for a solid twenty-two minutes after they defused it, just in case), and Clint was back on his feet, the rest of the team had sized up their own injuries and exhaustion and had made the collective decision to crash at a hotel for the night before making the trip back to the Tower.

(Bruce would have laughed at the mental image if he hadn’t been ready to drop).

JARVIS had politely mentioned that Bruce himself might want to “crash,” as well, but Bruce had shrugged him off. Clint had been exposed to that scientific nightmare excuse for a bomb for… a  _ while _ , and he had to make sure there wouldn’t be any long-term effects. And judging from the compounds he’d guessed were in there based on Clint’s description, they couldn’t be too careful.

So Bruce kept working, even as the little numbers on the clock in the corner of the screen kept blinking away. It didn’t really matter after a while, anyway; his eyes were starting to blur and he couldn’t make them out even with his glasses on. He zoomed as far in as he could on the diagrams and ignored the heaviness in his limbs.

A couple hours had passed like that when he finally heard footsteps coming down the stairs and looked up to see Tony jumping the bottom step into the lab. He had clearly come straight here from the plane; he was still wearing the suit he’d no doubt worn for the business trip and his hair was a mess of half sticked-up with gel and half flat against his head.

Predictably, he made a beeline for Bruce. “There you are—I was starting to think everyone had packed up and deserted the place. What gives, green bean?”

Bruce stifled a yawn behind his hand. “Didn’t JARVIS tell you?”

Tony stopped in his tracks, his hand still inches away from where he’d probably meant to clap it on Bruce’s shoulder. “I knew I forgot something.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “JARVIS? Unmute. I’m sorry, buddy.”

“I would prefer it if you did not do that again, sir.” JARVIS sounded as put out as an artificial intelligence could sound.

“I know, I know, but I didn’t think it would go over well with the investors if I was talking to a sentient program…” Tony dragged his fingers across his forehead. “So what happened? Where is everybody?”

Bruce explained as best he could through the tired fog that was slowly but surely settling through his brain. To his credit, Tony only interrupted a handful of times, mostly to say “ _ What? _ ” and “What the hell were they _ thinking? _ ” and  _ “Why  _ didn’t anyone  _ call me _ about this?”

“We tried,” Bruce said. “You weren’t answering.”

Tony shook his head a couple times before a thought apparently occurred to him. “Wait, which one of you called me?”

“Steve.”

“That explains it. Next time, you call me.”

“Next ti—Tony, Steve called you twelve times.”

Tony shrugged. Then he stretched and said, “Well, I don’t know about you, but that flight was abnormally longer than usual and I’m gonna call it a night.”

“Okay. Good night.” Bruce pressed his hand to his mouth to stifle another yawn. He could feel Tony watching him; despite his claim of going to bed, he still hadn’t moved a muscle. “What?”

“That was your cue to say ‘Wow, that’s a really good idea, Tony, I think I’ll join you.’” Tony paused. “Well, not  _ join me  _ join me. Unless you wanted to. But you get what I mean.”

“I really need to finish this.” Bruce reached out to tap something on the holographic screen only for Tony to whisk it out of the way with a finger. “Tony, come on.”

Tony leaned in so that his face hovered in front of Bruce right where the screen had been. “You can finish it tomorrow, once you’ve gotten some sleep.”

“You are the world’s biggest hypocrite,” Bruce protested. When Tony’s gaze didn’t flinch, he sighed. “I’m not kidding, I need to finish this. I’m on the verge of something here—”

"You’re also swaying on your feet,” Tony pointed out.

“No, I’m not—”

Tony grabbed the swivel chair Bruce had been leaning on—he couldn’t really sit down when the screens were so enormous—and spun it out of the way. Immediately, Bruce felt a wave of dizziness and had to catch himself on the edge of the desk, pointedly ignoring Tony’s raised eyebrows as he did so.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Now I understand what Rhodey’s talking about all the time. I never thought I would, but here we are.” He poked Bruce in the shoulder. “Come on. I’m gonna keep doing this until you listen to me and go to bed.” He poked again.

Bruce stepped out of range, a retort ready on his tongue, but as soon as he let go of the desk, his vision went gray and fuzzy and the lab seemed to tilt.

He stumbled.

* * *

When Bruce opened his eyes—a task that was very difficult, as his eyelids currently weighed about a million pounds—he was being carried up a staircase. This was such an unexpected situation that for a moment, his exhausted brain could only sit there and wonder at it.

But then it clicked, and Bruce didn’t exactly have very good experiences with waking up restrained, held tightly, and being transported to an unknown location, meaning he was well on his way to fully freaking out when he felt something hard digging into his side.

When he felt the arc reactor digging into his side.

Because Tony was the one carrying him up the stairs, and as far as Bruce was concerned, this was only slightly better than the idea of being captured.

Words spilled out of him as he struggled to look around. “Hey, hey, what the fuck is happening—put me the fuck down—Tony—”

“Nope!” The cheerful voice came from somewhere above his head, and Bruce blinked up to see Tony’s face from the very edges of his peripheral vision. “You have brought this delightful experience upon yourself by almost passing out in the lab. You’re welcome, by the way.”

_ Hypocrite _ , Bruce thought for the second time that day, but this time he didn’t say it aloud. Instead, he asked, a little desperately, “Can you please put me down?”

“Hey, quit wiggling. I don’t think the big guy would like it if I dropped you.” Tony hoisted Bruce higher up, and now Bruce could feel his teammate’s arm curling around his back. He was so glad the others were in a hotel. Out of all the times they’d seen him naked, lost, or transforming into an eight-foot-tall green monster, this would be up there in terms of his most embarrassing moments.

But they were almost at the top of the stairs, and the gentle back-and-forth motion was more soothing than he’d like to admit, and, well… he was tired. 

Bruce must have drifted off again, because the next thing he knew he was being lowered on top of a bed and Tony’s arms were suddenly gone from where they’d wrapped around him. It left him feeling oddly cold, but there was a blanket right underneath him now, so he rolled over until his head was on the pillow and he felt like he might sink right into the mattress.

There was a creak from the floor and Bruce opened his eyes again to see Tony carefully backing toward the door.

_ Fuck it. _

“Hey, where’re you going?” he asked.

Tony stopped, looking surprised that Bruce wasn’t already asleep. To be fair, so was Bruce. “I’m… I’m letting you sleep, big guy.  _ Someone _ in this tower has to.”

Bruce yawned. “I know. But you’re tired too, you said you had a long flight.”

“I was exaggerating,” Tony said breezily. “Multiple sources can affirm that I do that.” Despite this, he stayed where he was instead of edging closer to the door, staring at the bed—which, after all, was very large—with an almost longing look. Bruce could almost see the gears turning in his head.

With effort, Bruce pushed himself up on dead-weight limbs. He gave the top of the blanket next to him a little pat. “C’mon, get in here.” Yeah, he was definitely more tired than he’d thought.

Tony’s face would have been the most hilarious thing Bruce had seen if he hadn’t been struggling to keep his eyes open. His face split into a disbelieving grin and he shook his head. “No, you’re not serious. Contrary to popular belief, I do understand the concept of boundaries.”

“C’mon,” Bruce repeated. “I know I sleep better when I’m not alone… and you’re one to talk about boundaries.” He gestured sleepily to himself and his presence on the bed, indicating how he’d gotten to said bed.

Tony shook his head again, but he still didn’t move. “Bruce.”

“Tony,” Bruce countered.

There was a long pause where they held each other’s gazes and Bruce forced himself not to shut his eyes.

Finally, Tony muttered something under his breath, and a moment later the mattress sunk down with the added weight as he crawled into the bed next to Bruce. There was shifting for a few seconds as both of them rearranged themselves under the blankets, but the bed was big enough that they wouldn’t even touch unless one of them stretched a hand out.

“JARVIS?” Tony called out, his eyes already sliding shut. 

The light switched off in response, and Bruce let his eyes close at last in the sudden darkness. The room was quiet and the bed was warm now that the blankets trapped in their combined body heat. He pulled one of them tighter over his shoulder and buried his head in the pillow, all the thoughts about missions and calculations and bombs drifting from his mind.

Bruce fell asleep to the sound of Tony’s slow breathing.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
